On Trying To Be Buddhist

Light Dawns

When is a hole not a hole?  When it is a black hole.  I may be the last to find this out - I feel pretty stupid at the moment, but there it is.  For years I've taken the term at face value - that it is a hole, and it is black because, somehow, no radiation can escape it.  But much of what I have read about black holes made no sense given this understanding. 

This week I finally went looking for an answer and found many - here is one of the simpler ones: "A black hole is an object containing so much mass concentrated in a relatively small space that light cannot escape." So it is a hole only in terms of our perceptual field - not in its nature.  It is an object, a massive one, though not as physically large as its mass would imply. 

There's more.   "If you take any object and compress it down, there will be a point that it becomes a black hole. If you could compress the Sun down to a radius of 2.5 km, it would become a black hole. For the Earth, that radius is 0.9 cm. ... That radius is called the Schwarzschild Radius....[This radius] acts as an event horizon; a point at which nothing, not even light or radiation can escape it...   What actually happens to the mass within the Schwarzschild radius [that is, within the event horizon] is a mystery. Some theorists believe that an extremely dense state of matter will stop the black hole from compressing any further, while others believe that the black hole will continue compressing infinitely down. It’s unknown if you would encounter the black hole itself when passing through the event horizon, or if you would still continue to travel down to the compressed inner black hole itself."

Another source says, "once an object is inside of the event horizon it cannot escape. There are very interesting ideas about traveling into the black hole, through a tunnel called a worm hole, and coming out the other end at a white hole, but these are only fantastic ideas and hints from relativity equations, nothing solid."

Now I'm much happier - perhaps slightly more informed. 

Happy New Year.

Mind and Reality

Several weeks ago, shortly after writing My Mind on Tape Delay, I came across a statement by Jeffrey Grupp, a lecturer in English and Philosophy at Purdue University.  He states that nirvana is "the direct experience of quantum reality."  That's a mouthful.  Or mind-full, if you'd rather.  It recalls something the great Longchenpa said about people who have attained the highest levels of realization - that, among other powers, such a person  "can perceive the very atoms of [his] body."  That electrified me when I first read it because it was clear that Longchenpa was speaking literally.  Of course "atoms" in his Tibetan does not mean precisely what the word would mean to a 20th century physicist - but close enough.

Right away I went looking on the internet to see what else Grupp might be saying.  YouTube has one of his lectures (in eight parts) - so far I've listened through the fourth.  (The statement above comes from part 1.)  So - I'm just beginning to explore these ideas.....